Academic Journal Article Archives - Page 3 of 6

An Embarrassment of Changes: International Relations and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Mathew Davies and Christopher Hobson argue that the COVID-19 pandemic is part of an ongoing polycrisis that requires significant changes to the ways in which the discipline of International Relations understands the world. They propose that “Polycrisis is a way of capturing the tangled mix of challenges and changes [that] closely interact with one another, […]

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Replacing Sustainable Development: Potential Frameworks for International Cooperation in an Era of Increasing Crises and Disasters

Reviewing international cooperation on social and environmental change, and particularly the failure to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, Jem Bendell argues that the Sustainable Development framework is unable to address the increasing crises and disasters faced by the world today. As an alternative, he proposes an upgraded form of Disaster Risk Management that is detached

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Decline and Fall, Growth and Spread, or Resilience? Approaches to Studying How and Why Societies Change

Daniel Hoyer examines qualitative, case study, complex system, and societal dynamics approaches to explain “historical precedents of collapse, growth, and resilience.” He explains drawbacks to each method, and stresses “the importance of developing formal (especially mathematically articulated) mechanistic theory, as only by explicating what we think drives societal outcomes in a structured, formal way can

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Interacting Tipping Elements Increase Risk of Climate Domino Effects under Global Warming

The authors use Boolean and dynamic network models to investigate how the the interactions of climate tipping elements (Greenland Ice Sheet, West Antarctic Ice Sheet, Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), El Niño-Southern Oscillation, and Amazon rainforest) could produce domino effects (or tipping cascades) across other tipping elements. They find that tipping points in the Greenland

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Dynamics of Tipping Cascades on Complex Networks

This article examines network models to better predict tipping points, defined as “a critical threshold (tipping point) at which a tiny perturbation can qualitatively alter the state or development of the subsystem.” By using moisture measures in the Amazon rainforest as a model system, the authors determine that “clustering and spatial organization increase the vulnerability

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Anatomy and Resilience of the Global Production Ecosystem

The authors argue that the worldwide production and distribution of food, fuel, and fibre has created a “global production ecosystem” subject to immense simplification, intensification, and control by humans attempting to maximize efficiency. The resulting system is homogenous, highly connected, and has weak feedbacks – “features [that] converge to yield high and predictable supplies of

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Introduction: The European Union beyond the Polycrisis? Integration and Politicization in an Age of Shifting Cleavages

This article introduces a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy on Europe’s polycrisis, setting out the mechanisms of its “politics trap” and the strategies that have been utilized to try to deal with its constraints. It argues that “this ‘polycrisis’ is fracturing the European political system across multiple, simultaneous rifts, thereby creating a ‘polycleavage’.”

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Cascading Regime Shifts Within and Across Scales

Where regime shifts (also known as critical transitions) are generally studied within a single ecosystem, the authors explore cascading regimes shifts across multiple ecosystems. Drawing on the Regime Shifts Database of over thirty well-documented regime shifts, they identify three causal pathways by which a regime shift in one ecosystem relates causally to a regime shift

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